Fabio Berruti

Fabio Berruti (Savona, 1963), is the creator, founder and general coordinator of the R&D of licensing and the current Art Director of Infinite Statue. After studying graphic design and visual communication, he started his career as a photographer at a very young age, organising his first personal photography show at just 17 years old. Son of an artist (his mother was a late-Impressionist painter), he quickly combined the discipline of photography with that of pure graphics, starting to gain experience in studios and advertising agencies, first in Liguria and then in Milan.

He quickly became a freelancer, expanding the services he offered to many other professional fields: from communication to pure advertising, by way of fashion and still life, and simultaneously cultivating a serious artistic streak that resulted in many solo exhibitions, in Italy and abroad, both of pure photography and mixed-media painting/photography. He worked with and for a range of Italian and multinational brands, creating advertising images, promotional and institutional material, and entire national print campaigns across magazines, billboards and newspapers. His photographs were published by dozens of Italian and foreign newspapers.

The mid ‘90s marked a turning point for him, as he moved into the world of music, starting a new career that would lead him to design and create over 1500 packages, covers and promotional campaigns, and he was one of the main graphic designers responsible for the “restoration” of classic Italian music covers, restoring the entire works of Lucio Battisti and Fabrizio De Andrè to their original graphic form. He was the first to collaborate with major international record companies such as Sony, EMI, Warner, Universal and BMG, and for artists such as Vasco Rossi, Zucchero, Gianna Nannini, Alex Baroni, Carmen Consoli, Daniele Silvestri, Marco Masini, Incognito, Ennio Morricone, Riccardo Chailly and many more besides.

His works were published in over twenty issues of international graphic design publications, from Lürzer’s Archive to Print, winning three European Design Annual awards and various Creativity Distinction Awards in the USA. Over all those years, he signed his work with not just his name, but also the label “Infinite Studio”, for which he created promotional material every year which also received design awards.

In 2005/06, thanks to the great passion for statues that he had picked up during his travels abroad and the chronic urge to change direction, he came up with the idea of wanting to transform the great Italian heritage of comic books, illustration and cinema into a 3D format. Thus was born (with only four letters changed) “Infinite Statue” (the idea was actually conceived by his eldest son, Jacopo, at only 6 years old - but he never tells anyone that...).

Bringing such a huge enterprise to life was a lot more complex and difficult than he expected. Aside from everything that he needed for the physical creation of 3D objects (sculptors, decorators, materials, production, distribution etc...), he discovered that the world of Italian cinema was so inadequate and ill-prepared (both legally and culturally) for such a thing that it was impossible, at least at first, to find licences, whereas the world of comic books was already out of bounds for him in that he was considered a “newcomer”. But everything started to go smoothly when two authors (the first curious, the second puzzled) finally gave in to his insistent appeals, awarding him the first licences and their trust. These were Giancarlo Berardi for “Ken Parker” (maybe their shared Ligurian origins did something to help...) and Bruno Bozzetto for “Il Signor Rossi”.

In 2007, Infinite Statue was officially founded. The growth of the production and its reputation soon led to the desire to increasingly expand its borders, choosing to collaborate with Cosmic Group, a large distribution group, which came into possession of the brand and the entirety of the distribution in 2012. The current position and freedom of being Art Director (and Licensing Hunter) finally allowed him to find a way into international cinema (he is still working on Italian cinema...), designing the “Old & Rare” line that came to be a minor cult brand in the 3D world internationally.

Meanwhile his son, now all grown up and the creator of the name, sometimes wonders just when his father will decide to completely change direction once again...